Re: [Pan-users] How to fix "Unable to save ... Permission denied"?

[Duncan]

Beartooth posted on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:08:35 +0000 as excerpted:

>       I found a kludge. I managed to get giganews to reset my password;
> changed the newsserver setting to the new password; and that seems to've
> made things work again.
> 
>       I suspect, of course, that I'm getting things through giganews
> that I'd do better to get direct from grc.com or opera.no. It's a
> stopgap, and iirc it's the French who have a proverb saying nothing is
> so permanent as a temporary solution. Am I setting myself up for
> oncoming disaster?

If they're indeed coming thru giganews, then that means giganews carries 
the groups in question.  As long as it has reasonable propagation for 
those groups, and if anyone should, giganews should, you'll be fine, even 
if delayed by a few hours.  But some groups won't be propagated well as 
they're not officially propagated at all, only "leaked".  While giganews 
will with little down have the best feed of anyone for leaked groups, 
you'd definitely be better getting them from the group's home server, 
since propagation of individual posts will otherwise depend upon the more 
or less random chance of it leaking.

And replying to posts you're getting via leaks is likely to be more 
problematic still, since the path back to the home server may well be 
even worse than the path from it to you.

But, keep in mind that pan 0.90+ is /designed/ to work reasonably 
transparently with multiple servers -- as long as a group is carried on a 
server according to its newsrc file, pan will try to fetch headers and 
articles from that server.  Thus, for groups that giganews carries, even 
under normal circumstances, you might get some of the posts from there, 
especially if the home server is slow to respond or overloaded, for some 
reason.  That'd be a quite normal situation.

And for posting, pan selects the server used to post based on a group's 
default posting profile, as overridable per individual post.  Pan will 
thus attempt to post to a server if it's the one in the posting profile 
chosen, regardless of the status of the newsrc for that server.  As long 
as you have the posting profile and news server information set 
correctly, posting should happen to the profile's configured server 
regardless of what else might be screwed up, so that shouldn't be an 
issue, or if it is, it's an entirely separate issue from the newsrc issue 
of this thread.


>       What I did before, btw, was to open servers.xml with gedit, and
> just tell it to find and replace btth with bttth everywhere.

That was probably fine... unless you were using btth as the username or 
password somewhere, thus explaining why it was complaining about it.

But, depending on the exact sequence you used when you setup pan on bttth, 
vs copying the files from btth, it's possible that you had a mix of files 
from both, and that the sequence of the servers didn't match, so for 
instance newsrc-1 could point to the giganews newsrc in one case and say 
grc.com's newsrc in the other.  Straightening that out if I were doing it 
locally wouldn't be a huge issue, but attempting to tell someone else how 
to do it remotely... not so easy.  That's why I recommended simply 
deleting both servers.xml and the newsrc-* files and starting over with a 
new server config, because it's far simpler and less risky than trying to 
figure out the situation and advise you how to edit it properly, remotely.

A simpler way of saying that is simply that the search and replace should 
have worked fine.  That it didn't indicates that there's another unknown 
issue that has thrown a monkey wrench into things, and finding and fixing 
that unknown issue is difficult to do remotely.  The easier fallback is 
to simply kill the screwed up bits entirely and reconfigure them.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman